Harvard Business School: Accounting & Management Unit Research Paper Serieshttp://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/JELJOUR_Results.cfm?form_name=journalBrowse&journal_id=1319762The Accounting & Management Unit strives to be the worldwide leader in research, course development, and teaching on top managements' use of performance measurement systems.
Unit research, course development, and teaching fall into two broad areas: Financial Reporting and Analysis and Management Accounting. The Unit's research helps scholars and educators understand current best practices for the design and use of performance measurement systems that help managers to build more effective, value-creating organizations by:
- communicating with external investors to ensure that their firms' securities are fairly priced and that they are able to access capital;
- measuring and evaluating their firms' economic performance;
- improving resource allocation and strategy implementation within their firms; and
- building accountability for performance through effective external and internal governance.en-us2019-06-06 00:00:00.0https://www.ssrn.com/rss/SSRN RSS Generator 1.0editor@ssrn.comwebmaster@ssrn.comPolitical Influence and Merger Antitrust Reviewshttp://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2945020<a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=362549" target="_blank">Mihir N. Mehta</a>, <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=385638" target="_blank">Suraj Srinivasan</a> and <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=760954" target="_blank">Wanli Zhao</a><br />Antitrust regulators play a critical role in protecting market competition. We examine whether firms can use the political process to opportunistically influence antitrust reviews of corporate merger transactions. We exploit the fact that in some mergers, acquirers and/or targets are connected to powerful U.S. politicians that serve on the two congressional committees with antitrust regulator oversight. We find that merger parties with these connections receive relatively favorable antitrust review outcomes. To establish a causal link, we use plausibly exogenous shocks to firm-politician links and a falsification test. Politician incentives to influence merger antitrust review outcomes appear to be driven by lobbying, contributions, and prior business connections. In sum, our findings suggest that political interference affects the ability of antitrust regulators to provide independent recommendations about the anti-competitive effects of mergers.2017-09-15 20:29:24.0http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2945020rTSR: When Do Relative Performance Metrics Capture Relative Performance?http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3380516<a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=432617" target="_blank">Paul Ma</a>, <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1884197" target="_blank">Jee-Eun Shin</a> and <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1467653" target="_blank">Charles C. Y. Wang</a><br />Relative total shareholder returns (rTSR) has become the predominant metric to isolate managers' idiosyncratic performance. Among firms that explicitly use rTSR in relative performance contracts, 60%―those that choose specific peers as benchmarks―select rTSR metrics that do a remarkable job of filtering out the systematic component of returns in adherence to the informativeness principle. However, firms that choose index-based benchmarks retain substantial systematic noise in their rTSR metrics. We document that the selection of noisy benchmarks is associated with compensation consultants' preferences, which are uncorrelated with observable firm attributes. Firms with weak governance are more likely to choose indexes, not because of opportunism, but because they do not adequately scrutinize outside experts' advice. Collectively, our findings provide a new explanation for why some executives are evaluated based on systematic noise, and novel evidence on how compensation consultants can impact firms.2019-06-20 20:06:58.0http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3380516